Lady Fareham had an air of caring for neither town nor country, but on the whole preferred town.
“London has become a positive desert—and the smoke from the smouldering ruins poisons the garden and terrace whenever there is an east wind,” she complained. “But Oxfordshire would be a worse desert—and I believe I should die of the spleen in a week, if I trusted myself in that great rambling Abbey. I can just suffer life in London; so I suppose I had best stay till his lordship has finished his business, about which he is so secret and mysterious.”
Denzil was more devoted, more solicitous to please than ever; and had a better chance of pleasing now that most of her ladyship’s fine visitors had left town. He read aloud to Hyacinth and her sister as they worked—or pretended to work—at their embroidery frames. He played the organ, and sang duets with Angela. He walked with her on the terrace, in the cold, bleak afternoon, and told her the news of the town—not the scandals and trivialities which alone interested Lady Fareham, but the graver facts connected with the state and the public welfare—the prospects of war or peace, the outlook towards France and Spain, Holland and Sweden, Andrew Marvel’s last speech, or the last grant to the King, who might be relied on to oppose no popular measure when his lieges were about to provide a handsome subsidy or an increase of his revenue.
“We are winning our liberties from him,” Denzil said.
“For the mess of pottage we give, the money he squanders on libertine pleasures, England is buying freedom. Yet why, in the name of common sense, maintain this phantom King, this Court which shocks and outrages every decent Englishman’s sense of right, and maintains an ever-widening hotbed of corruption, so that habits and extravagances once unknown beyond that focus of all vice, are now spreading as fast as London; and wherever there are bricks and mortar there are profligacy and irreligion? Can you wonder that all the best and wisest in this city regret Cromwell’s iron rule, the rule of the strongest, and deplore that so bold a stroke for liberty should have ended in such foolish subservience to a King of whom we knew nothing when we begged him to come and reign over us?”
“But if you win liberty while he is King, if wise laws are established—”
“Yes; but we might have been noble as well as free. There is something so petty in our resumed bondage. Figure to yourself a thoroughbred horse that had kicked off the traces, and stood free upon the open plain with arched neck and lifted nostrils, sniffing the morning air! and behold he creeps back to his harness, and makes himself again a slave! We had done with the Stuarts, at the cost of a tragedy, and in ten years we call them back again, and put on the old shackles; and for common sense, religion, and freedom, we have the orgies of Whitehall, and the extravagance of Lady Castlemaine. It will not last, Angela; it cannot last. I was with his lordship in Artillery Row last night, and we talked with the blind sage who would sacrifice the remnant of his darkened days in the cause of liberty.”
“Sir Denzil, I hope you are not plotting mischief—you and my brother,” Angela said anxiously. “You are so often together; and his lordship has such a preoccupied air.”
“No, no, there is no conspiring; but there is plenty of discontent. It would need but little to fire the train. Can any man in his senses be happy when he sees his country, which ten years ago was at the pinnacle of power and renown, sinking to the appanage of a foreign sovereign; England threatened with a return to Rome; honest men forbidden to preach the gospel; and innocent seekers after truth hounded off to gaol, to rot among malefactors, because they have dared to worship God after their own fashion?”
“Where was your liberty of conscience under the Protectorate, when the Liturgy was forbidden as if it were an unholy thing, when the Anglican priests were turned out of their pulpits, and the Anglican service tolerated in only one church in all this vast London?” Angela asked indignantly.